Ironworks on the Saugus: The Lynn and Braintree Ventures of the Company of Undertakers of the Ironworks in New England

xvi, 328 pp. "It was, perhaps, the most magnificent failure of the seventeenth century. The Braintree and Hammersmith ironworks, constructed in the early 1640's, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was truly the forerunner of American "big business." Conceived in the mind of John Winthrop the Younger and financed by a group of English "capitalists" with visions of industrial empire, this ironworks was a technological integration of furnace, forge, and slitting mill, operating with almost assembly-line precision."